Posted
by
EditorDavid
on Sunday November 05, 2017 @10:58AM
from the spell-different dept.

An anonymous reader quotes Mashable:
We became privy to a new iPhone keyboard glitch after a few Mashable staffers recently started having issues with their iPhone keyboards, specifically with vowels. The issue started when iOS 11's predictive text feature began to display an odd character in the place of the letter "I," offering up "A[?] instead and autocorrecting within the message field...The bug was also covered by MacRumors, but it appears that my colleagues have even more issues than just the letter "I." One reported that they were also seeing the glitch with the letters "U" and "O" as well, making the problem strictly restricted to vowels. They also said the letters showed up oddly in iMessage on Mac devices, and shared some more screenshots of what the glitch looks like when they went through with sending a message. The glitch wasn't just limited to iMessage, however. My colleagues shared screenshots of their increasingly futile attempts to type out messages on Facebook Messenger...and Twitter.
Apple seems to be acknowledging that the iOS 11.1 glitch may affect iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. "Here's what you can do to work around the issue until it's fixed by a future software update," Apple posted on a support page, advising readers to "Try setting up Text Replacement for the letter 'i'."

Like the Headphone jack, vowels are obsolete. It makes sense for Apple to phase them out for us in their latest phones, hopefully leading the rest of the industry to remove them from Android phones, keyboards in general, and so on, within the next couple of years.

Now, sure, some might say "Hey, I still use vowels, they're really useful when you're trying to distinguish between two words that have the same consonants, but a different sound joining them, like "cat" and "cut"", but that's old thinking, as leaving a gap is perfectly fine and should be good enough for everyone. Who cares if you were using lots of cheap old consonants? They're inefficient and completely unnecessary. So cat at out.

Oh, didn't you hear? You can buy the new iVowels for only $199 per device.

Soon they'll be launching iTalk;-) which will be a proprietary language necessary for the use of all iCrap (and essential as a caste indicator). It'll be based in equal parts on Esperanto and Scientology.

Now, sure, some might say "Hey, I still use vowels, they're really useful when you're trying to distinguish between two words that have the same consonants, but a different sound joining them, like "cat" and "cut"", but that's old thinking, as leaving a gap is perfectly fine and should be good enough for everyone. Who cares if you were using lots of cheap old consonants? They're inefficient and completely unnecessary. So cat at out.

Like the Headphone jack, vowels are obsolete. It makes sense for Apple to phase them out for us in their latest phones, hopefully leading the rest of the industry to remove them from Android phones, keyboards in general, and so on, within the next couple of years.

Because they likely fucked up ripping off a Blackberry feature. If it inserted a period and kept the double space, it would be more efficient under regular use, and auto correct if you miss hitting the period. If it replaces the double space with a period only, that's typical Apple thinking.

Just because you have new hardware or OS, why rewrite the code for an application that already works? Of course, maybe they didn't rewrite the keyboard code and something in the OS is interacting with the keyboard code that's screwed up. In either case, there's a quality control testing problem with code development .

Probably because input is a major limiting factor, particularly in an age where people are doing more and more on their phone. Even a small increment in input ease translates to a large increase in convenience. But on the flip side, even a small bug can be a big frustration.

So the answer is it is sometimes quite important to improve a working bit of code, particularly in a competitive environment, but you really, really have to be sure that you're actually improving it.

You are spot on and I am saying that despite taking the let's-develop-it-from-scratch path quite easily myself. New versions affecting so basic functionalities indicates past (old code not flexible enough) or present (too invasive modifications) incompetence. Additionally, these bugs are usually more difficult to be found because most of the testing will be focused on the new features by assuming that all the old parts continue working fine.

I'm seeing all kinds of bugs everywhere.-- Text alignment on messages (keyboard interferes so I can't see what I'm writing, first line scrolls halfway off the screen, etc... )-- Focus jumping around on forms I'm trying to fill out on Safari. Several web sites. Tried to sign-up to their mailing list and couldn't. Safari kept jumping back two or three fields in mid-word as I typed.-- Text messages arrive on my computer but not on my phone. Or messages take hours t

You cannot use or obtain iOS legally without spending many times more than other brands charge for phones that don't fuck up when you ask them the weather (The Reg article today).

Supposedly, that cost goes on the "quality" of the device. I wasn't even referring to iOS when I made my comment. Because this is one in a never-ending series of cock-ups by Apple over the last few years that show their app store vetting, device production quality, software update mechanisms and basic software quality are no

The problematic sequence that gets generated is the capital I followed by the hex sequence ef b8 8f, which is known as Variation Selector 16. That's “An invisible codepoint which specifies that the preceding character should be displayed with emoji presentation. Only required if the preceding character defaults to text presentation.” So in a sense it's technically correct, it's trying to say to display an eye or eyes when you've typed an "I". The problem is twofold: a) people aren't trying to type emoji, and 2) it doesn't actually work.